Benj’s blog!

I just Googled for RSS sucks and anti-mega: RSS. Sucks. was top. The point really isn’t that the aggregators suck, it’s that RSS sucks for some things.

Imagine waking up in the morning and having a few hundred ’special’ newspapers delivered to your door. The special newspapers arrive in the form of an unordered index and each article printed on a page. To find out what’s going on, read the index note the page number, then go and read the full article on the corresponding page. How do you know what the big issues are? You don’t! Where the structure and layout of the pages in the newspaper provided an efficient visual means of communicating “importance”, RSS gives you nothing but an index.

So, if anyone actually read what I wrote here, they might say, well that’s not a problem with RSS, just add a priority tag or something. It’s hardly the same though is it? The RSS mechanism: index + links, simply isn’t powerful enough to allow a reader to deal with whole swaths of information. So much work has gone into conveying structure with XML documents (RSS is simply an application of XML) and RSS simply removes that structure and gives you the bare essentials.

RSS has it’s applications, i.e. for seeing when infrequently updated sites change. Taking it a little further maybe it is suitable when getting your bank balance, account history, stock information. Ramming 350 stories into my aggregator and expecting me to sift through them is not a good application! It’s a bit too soon to start predicting the death of the browser.

This makes interesting reading. All (three) Windows users that I have spoken to today have been affected by this “worm” which takes advantage of a problem discovered and fixed in July 2003. Imagine being able to run arbitrary pieces of code on other peoples machines … ! DCOM RPC makes it possible :).

The patch for XP 32bit is here. Otherwise see here.

I’ve noticed in the logs that (the few) people who read this blog via RSS mainly subscribe to the 0.91 and 1.0 versions of the feed. The 2.0 version is more fully featured (the entire entry is visible from within your aggregator) and so I suggest you subscribe to that. (In NetNewsWire: Find “Benj’s blog” and select Show Info then change RSS to http://www.ijneb.com/blog/index.rss.)

I guess when Pie/Atom/(not)Echo is “finalised” and supported in your aggregators I’ll support that. Then again, RSS sucks …

Just a few days ago, Joe received his GPS Mouse/Dome and we decided to play around and to see what good Mac Software we could find. Unfortunately there was nothing that quite met our needs and so I decided today to start writing something in Cocoa. Around 1930hrs I noticed a small red blip appear at Joe’s house on the map. Eureka, it was working!

The results so far and evidence of GPSMap working can be seen here (GPSMap, until I think of a better name - suggestions?). For the geeks techie folks around here, it talks to GPSd via TCP and plots the route on a map so far. Cooler features to come, including map downloading, auto map selection, waypoint/point of interesting setting.